They Owe It All To Zion

Local H, A Small-town Rock 'N' Roll Act, Becomes A Band With A National Following

January 26, 1997|By Ted Kleine. Special to the Tribune.

A one-trick pony in a one-horse town

You're feeling lonely and the cable's down

You feel like the only freak in this town

Got a life of scratching tickets at the local Gas-n-Stop

Suck on another Winston and hear the brain cells pop . . .

Can you feel the radiation dragging your system down?

You won't feel the alienation and you'll never leave this town

--"Nothing Special" by Local H

First there was "Greetings from Asbury Park, New Jersey," Bruce Springsteen's ironic, spit-flecked postcard to his seaside hometown. Then came The Pretenders, with Cleveland-born Chrissie Hynde lamenting, "I went back to Ohio, but my city was gone." Bob Seger's "Main Street" recounted "the pool halls, the hustlers and the losers" back in Ann Arbor, Mich. And Nirvana called its posthumous singles collection "From the Banks of the Muddy Wishkah" for the river that flows through Aberdeen, Wash., a town Kurt Cobain spent most of his 27 years trying to get away from.

Musicians love to sing about their hometowns. They devote songs and even entire albums to sentimentalizing and snarling at the towns they busted out of. But most, especially those from places such as Cleveland and Ann Arbor, Asbury Park and Aberdeen, would rather go through an entire tour with an out-of-tune guitar than move back.

Take Local H, the two-man band from Zion that recently toured as the opening act for Stone Temple Pilots. "As Good As Dead," their second album, is a 13-song suite about oafish high-school jocks, chicks who let you down, crummy bars and the frustration of being almost 25 years old in a town where, as singer Scott Lucas moans in "Fritz's Corner," a song about hanging out at local bar, "there's nothing much else for me to do."

"The whole record is actually about Zion," said Lucas, who now lives in Chicago but who less than two years ago was living with his parents in Zion and making sandwiches at a Subway shop there.

"As Good As Dead," released in 1996 on Island Records (the same label that carries U2), already has produced a pair of alternative-radio singles, "Bound to the Floor" and "High Fiving MF."

The song "Eddie Vedder," about a girlfriend of Lucas' who was obsessed with the Pearl Jam singer, was the subject of a short article in Rolling Stone magazine. And in November, Local H landed the opening slot on the Stone Temple Pilots tour, which hit Madison Square Garden and the Rosemont Horizon.

("I think every band wanted to be on that tour, and they (Stone Temple Pilots) just liked our record," Lucas said. "What can I say? They got great taste in bands.")

"As Good As Dead" already is doing for Local H what "Asbury Park" did for Springsteen and "Main Street" for Seger: transforming a small-town rock 'n' roll act into a band with a national following. "The thing is, the whole record issues from Zion, being trapped in a small town," said Joe Daniels, the band's drummer.

"It's cool to grow up there, but then get out or else you get stuck. (Scott) wrote what he was dealing with: cable's down, nothing to do outside. In Zion, you're either in high school or you got married to your high school sweetheart, knocked her up, and you're working at the power plant or Abbott Laboratories."

Local H (the band was named for a road where Zion teenagers go to hang out) has earned the right to be spokesman for the disaffected youth of its hometown. The band played its very first gig in Zion, in the auditorium of Zion-Benton High School, from which Lucas and Daniels graduated in 1988.

After high school, Local H gravitated toward the tiny underground music scene in northeastern Lake County, playing in front of a few dozen people on bills with such local punkers as Lunkhead and Gainsay.

"There was a sort of a scene that tried to start, sort of like a punk scene that tried to start around the area," Lucas recalled after an early November show at the Vic in Chicago.

Slouching in a chair in one of the club's basement dressing rooms, his gray T-shirt sagging with sweat accumulated onstage, his shoulder-length hair damp and stringy, his energy dissipated by the angry half-hour set he had just played, he talked about the band's early days, when the name Local H was seen on street signs, not CD covers.

"A lot of people were putting together scenes," Lucas said. "There were some bands that were known in Waukegan and stuff like that--basically, toward Waukegan and Gurnee--and we were able to latch on to that. But it kind of petered out after a while, because you've got to go somewhere else."

The group had some success in Chicago, playing with other bands at the Metro and the now-defunct Avalon and even did some college-town shows in Illinois and Wisconsin. But five years out of high school, Local H was still a struggling, hand-to-mouth band, and the grind of playing for no rewards was starting to wear the members down.